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Month: August 2012

Do you remember the Destiny’s Child song “No Scrubs”? I distinctly remember the lyrics that went something like “No, I don’t want your number. No, I don’t wanna give you mine and no, I don’t wanna meet you nowhere. No, I don’t want none of your time.”

Okay so I could be butchering it a bit as I am too lazy to look up the exact lyrics to verify but you get the gist. I think I should get that song, put it on my phone, and then play it back every time I receive what I term negative male attention. Which brings me to my next danger of singledom… unwanted phone numbers.

I’ll go ahead and countdown the list of recent experience:
5. Man I met in bar who every night would text me something with the word sexy in it. Use a thesaurus.
4. One of my clients.
3. A man twice my age who asked his buddy to ask me if I was dating someone. Just lie and say yes.
2. Someone who wants me to be their girl on the side
And the most undesirable number of all in recent months…
1. A cop who recognized my friend’s car, followed us home, chatted me up and later in the night left a note for me in my windshield with his number and a message that he wasn’t a stalker. Except for the part where he followed me home. And left a note. On my car. Parked in my driveway. And the subsequent times that he drove by my house and shone his police light into my windows just to “check on me”. Oh and also – he’s married.

From what I hear though the bad news is that even if I were dating someone or married, guys would still be…themselves. So just need to come up with some really good lines in the meantime. Here’s my list thus far:
You’ll be the first guy I’ve gone out with since that recent herpes flair up
I breed cats for a living
I don’t believe in shaving
I’m getting to be that age – would you like to be a daddy
I just lost 100 pounds, I’m sure I won’t gain it all back
I am a rules girl
My mom screens all the men I go out with, when are you available to Skype

I’ll let you know my success. So far this seems my best ammunition against yet another danger. Also for the record only some of those are true.

I only have two at this point but sometimes when I meet people for the first time I see their expressions change when I jest about being a cat lady. Two is a good number – not too much poop to scoop and they play together. I can also leave them on their own for days at a time and they don’t die. They both make me laugh and I talk to them. I do not however dress them in outfits or post videos of them on YouTube. Pictures on Facebook but no videos. Yet. It’s just nice to have someone to chat with. And they always agree with me. And love me more than anyone else. Which is only because I feed them but whatever – I’ll take what I can get.

The cat thing was a slippery slope for sure. It is a clear and present danger of the single lady lifestyle. At first I got this older needy cat who just wanted to cuddle all the time…and I do mean all the time. There were no boundaries. I had to do some business in the bathroom – cat sat on my lap. It was when he started urinating on everything that he had to go. Before he really went to town tinkling on all my belongings, I got him a kitten to play with because I thought he was lonely. The kitten was super fun and is even better now that he’s mellowed into a fat, lazy adult. I’m not going to tell you how I got rid of the first cat because I think it’s probably one of the worst things I’ve ever done. That being said you now probably think I did something illegal which is not the case however I’m still not proud and don’t want to write about it. So now I had the kitten plus my boyfriend at the time had a cat. My boyfriend being irresponsible and an idiot (which is why he subsequently became my ex-boyfriend) didn’t have housing he could move to that allowed pets. So his cat came to live with me and my kitty. In the meantime though there was this little stray that someone had dumped and he was really sweet and manipulative. So I took him home as well. Three cats was the real low point. Luckily loser ex finally got a place which allowed animals and took his back. I felt bad as that cat really enjoyed playing with the other two and I thought the four of us had a nice rhythm going. I do think it infringed on my dating life though when I opened my mouth about three cats. Zero is best, one is to be expected with women of a certain age, two might make sense for socialization purposes but three is just…unacceptable.

Just get a dog – at least then you’ll have to get out of the house and walk it. The exercise will prevent you from experiencing other dangers such as I weigh as much as an eighteen wheeler and I may be an agoraphobe. No one ever gets called a dog lady.

People tell me I’m a good writer. My mom has told me for awhile I should start a blog. I didn’t until today though have a platform I felt was blog-worthy. Then I got stuck in my dress.

I have this collection of Target dresses that fit me perfectly and are fabulous for the days when I didn’t quite get out of bed early enough to put together an outfit. Throw on dress – grab cardigan – shoes – done. Today I grabbed a red dress and black wrappy thing with strings. (As an aside, this black wrappy thing has gotten me into trouble before when I went to the bathroom and didn’t mind the strings… but I digress) I got the dress mostly zipped as per the usual and then made one of my coworkers finish the job once I got to work. I had to work late and then go buy eggs. My running group is having an end of season celebration tomorrow night and I promised to make brownies. Then I discovered my eggs had been bad for several weeks. (Which in itself is another danger of singledom – food going rotten all the time because there are simply not enough people to eat it) Anywho – so after work went to store in my work finery and came home for baking magic. Turned on oven and rushed upstairs anxious to put on stripey PJ pants and t-shirt. This is the moment when everything nearly collapsed in on itself. While I typically can’t wiggle around enough to zip up my clothing, I can usually get it off. Not so tonight. I’m not sitting here typing still wearing that dress but lets just say it took considerably more effort than normal to get out of that thing.

So I started thinking. This whole single, independent thing has its pros but certainly there are downsides. Such as getting stuck in your work dress. Also it’s a little awkward asking random colleagues to finish dressing you – a task you should have been able to accomplish solo after all those lessons about tying and buttoning on Sesame Street. And always having stinky food in your refrigerator because you never eat it because eating alone is depressing. Being the maid, gardener, trash person, cook, plumber, handyman, and nanny (well, for the two cats) all in one. It’s exhausting.

I feel there must be more of my kind out there. I’m twenty-nine, have a good job, own my home, live with two cats and rarely vacuum. (Singledom presents many dangers, but one bonus is not having to do certain chores just because other people are bothered by the tumbleweed-esque balls of cat fur skating across the floors.) While I jest about the trivial inconveniences of living alone, I’ve had some truly not so safe encounters that will make any parent’s stomach turn (impaling my elbow with a nail, climbing into my attic unattended, dropping an air conditioner out a second story window…just to name a few). The real reason though for writing is I get lonely. As busy as I keep myself, at the end of the night there’s just something to be said for having someone to talk to before you go to sleep. So in the absence of a human and to satisfy my friend who insists it is inappropriate and weird to have conversations with my cats, I’m blogging. Get excited.